Which is more portable: stty < or stty >

[Guy Harris]

>Currently, 4.0.3 defaults to using the native stty.  According to a
>Sun rep, the next release (4.1) will default to the System V version,
>although the next version (5.0) will not have any "preference" (his
>word, which he could not explain).  It actually sounded to me like
>that have simply not yet decided.

It sounds to *me* like your Sun rep is seriously confused.  (If he
couldn't explain his use of "preference", why was he using it?  Yeesh.)

As of when I left Sun, the intent was to have the BSD environment be the
"default", in the sense that if the environment variable PATH isn't set,
the "default" path will *not* have "/usr/5bin" before "/bin" or
"/usr/bin" (BTW, in SunOS 4.x, there's no point in having "/bin" in your
path at all, if you have "/usr/bin" there - "/bin" is just a symlink to
"/usr/bin").

"5.0" has not necessarily been chosen as the name for Sun's System V
Release 4-based release.  If the rep was thinking of that release, the
"stty" in "/usr/bin" or wherever will, as one would expect, have the
System V behavior.  I don't know if System V Release 4 from AT&T will
have a "/usr/ucb/stty" that provides the BSD behavior or not; even if
they don't, Sun might put one into their release.

>Will POSIX provide an answer, or perhaps, provide a stty90 which has a
>real interface?

According to my copy of Draft 9 of 1003.2:

	The "stty" utility sets or reports on terminal I/O
	characteristics for the device that is its standard input.

I don't think this is the latest draft, but I'd be surprised if they
changed this in a later draft.